A few dark-brown kites—similar to those that Angland has seen some years previously at curious Cairo and barren Aden—sit panting with open beaks on the hot branches of the stunted quinine and gutta-percha trees, too overcome by the heat even to move as the party rides by, almost within arm’s length of them. The country round about, as the horsemen get well out into the plain, is almost a dead flat; the only difference in level being the long, wide, gentle rises which, like ocean waves, cross the shimmering expanse of heated earth from east to west, at distances apart of about a couple of miles. Every kind of animal life is gradually left behind as the travellers push on; not even a kite, or a “gohanna,” as old Williams calls the ignana-like lizards that are generally common throughout the bush, is to be seen. The weary horses wade patiently through the dust, which is so fine that it rises into the air on the slightest provocation. The horizon is a level circle of monotonous, grey-brown tree-tops; the middle distance sunburnt, reddish clay, grass that reminds one of the harmless, necessary doormat, and dusty tree-stems; and the immediate foreground is hidden in clouds of dust, so fine, so penetrating, that Claude feels his throat to resemble the interior of a lime-kiln before half the day’s journey is done.
This desert country, however, is left behind by the time the dull-red sunset has begun to tinge the pillar of dust raised by the horses of a lovely rose colour, and at last a détour is made from Billy’s old tracks in order to reach a water-hole known only to the Myall (native) pilots. And Claude blesses his black friend Billy, in his heart, for having procured the guides, as he sees the horses prick their dust-covered ears, and liven up as they sniff the refreshing odour of the little mud-surrounded pool of dirty liquid.
The next few days’ travelling are monotonous in the extreme. Sometimes the party toil over red deserts, whose sterile surfaces offer hardly a mouthful, even of withered grass, for the horses, and where no water can be found with which to refresh the suffering animals. For the country has suffered from a continual drought for two years or more, and the moist mud which still remained in the water-holes that Billy luckily came across, on his late journey to Murdaro Station, has all disappeared.
At other times the horses pick their stumbling way over rough and semi-mountainous tracts of country, that stretch on all sides in an apparently interminable and dreary treeless waste. Here and there, however, little patches of far better country are traversed, where water and dried but highly nutritious herbage is to be found. On arriving at one of these oases when the expedition has been nearly a week “out,” Claude, acting by his friend Williams’s advice, determines to spell his horses for a day, and camps by a rocky pool, fringed with a feathery belt of dark she-oaks. Close by rises a flat-topped little bit of light-red sandstone covered with euphorbia trees, and, upon the morning after his arrival, Claude proceeds to explore this elevation, taking with him the runaway station boy, who can speak a little broken English, and has introduced himself to Angland by the name of General Gordon.
The view that meets Claude’s eyes from the summit of the scalloped and overhanging sandstone cliffs well repays the trouble he has taken in scrambling up their tawny sides. Numerous other fortification-like projections are to be seen on all sides standing up, like weird islands, above the surface of the haze-bounded expanse of rolling desert.
He sits down and drinks in the weird, harmonious picture of desolation before him, and, as he does so, some lines of Pringle, the explorer-poet of South Africa, float into his memory:—
“A region of emptiness, howling and drear,
Which man has abandoned from famine and fear;
Which the snake and the lizard inhabit alone,
With the twilight bat from the yawning stone;